NOW - THEN

My dad says we are very lucky. When he was a boy, everything was different. First of all, there weren’t any subways or railroads. He used his bicycle to go to school. There weren’t many buses. There weren’t any shopping malls or big theatres. There was only one movie theatre showing one film a week.
Now, there are many movie theatres in the city and I can see many new films every week. He says there weren’t any big supermarkets, either. There was a big bazaar on Sundays and he went there with his mom to buy vegetables and fruit. It must be difficult to carry all that food.
There are two big supermarkets near our house now and they are open every day. When my dad was a boy, there was only one bookstore in his town and there weren’t many children’s books in the store. Now we can read books even online or there are e-books we can read on our tablets. Before there were only a few channels on TV and there weren’t any kids channels. How can that be?
He says there weren’t so many technological devices. No laptops, no tablets or computer games. Can you imagine that? It sounds a little boring. But he says some things were better when he was a young boy.
There were a lot of trees in his town and it was very green. There weren’t many factories and the rivers were clean and full of fish. There weren’t many bridges on the rivers, either. Now the rivers are full of garbage and there are three big bridges. He says there weren’t many cars, and of course, there was no traffic. Now there are a lot of cars on the streets and there is air pollution.
It’s also very noisy in the city, both during the day and at night. My dad says it was very quiet and peaceful in the 1960s. It sounds like it was beautiful when he was a boy.